Enclosure, Carra, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carra, Co. Galway

There is something quietly melancholy about an ancient enclosure that survives only as a curve.

In the pastureland around Carra in County Galway, a subtriangular earthwork was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, measuring roughly fourteen metres along its northwest to southeast axis and about twelve metres across the northeast to southwest. By the time anyone looked closely at it again, much of it had gone.

When the site was inspected in March 1984, it had been extensively quarried, with workings pressing in from both north and south. What remained was a single arc of earthen bank, roughly two and a half to nearly three metres wide and between one and one point four metres high, curving from the east around through the south to the west. The original shape, whatever its full extent or purpose, had been largely consumed. Enclosures of this general type, often referred to in Irish archaeology as ringforts or cashels depending on their construction material, were typically used as enclosed farmsteads or for livestock during the early medieval period, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say more than that about any individual example. To the south and west of the surviving bank, traces of a possible associated field system were also noted, suggesting the enclosure was once part of a wider organised landscape rather than an isolated feature.

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